One of the six who built Iskra: the Menshevik theorist who parted with Lenin
Witnessing the October Revolution, Potresov called it "the murder of democracy" and the Bolshevik regime that followed "the socialism of fools."
One of the six original editors of Iskra (1900) and a founding figure of the RSDLP. At the 1903 party congress he sided with Martov and became a leading Menshevik theorist, arguing for a mass party against Lenin's vanguard model. During WWI he led the defensist wing of Menshevism; he rejected the October Revolution and was briefly imprisoned by the Cheka in 1919. He left the USSR in 1925 and continued writing against the Soviet regime from Berlin and Paris until his death.
Career Timeline
- 1892–1896Active in Struve's and Martov's SD circles; contacts with Emancipation of Labour group
- 1896Co-founds the Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class
- 1897–1899Arrested and exiled to Vyatka province
- 1900–1903One of six founding editors of Iskra; joins Menshevik leadership after the II Congress
- 1905–1907Returns to Russia; edits Menshevik papers Nachalo and Nevsky Golos
- 1910–1914Edits the Liquidator journal Nasha Zarya; co-edits the 4-volume The Social Movement in Russia
- 1914–1917Leads the Menshevik defensists; publishes Nashe Delo
- 1925–1934Exiled in Berlin and Paris; publishes Notes of a Social Democrat and the book In the Grip of Illusions
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Menshevik newspaper editor
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionMenshevik defensist leaderHe categorically rejected the October Revolution, calling it 'the murder of democracy' and 'the socialism of fools.' He then joined the anti-Bolshevik underground 'Union for the Regeneration of Russia' and was arrested by the Cheka in 1919.
Political Thought: From Liquidationism to the Critique of Revolution
After the 1905 Revolution, Potresov emerged as the leading theorist of 'Liquidationism' within Menshevism. He regarded the maintenance of an illegal underground party under the tsarist autocracy as anachronistic, and argued that the Social Democratic movement should be rebuilt through legal mass organisations: trade unions, cooperatives, Duma activity, and an open press. The monthly journal Nasha Zarya (Our Dawn), which he founded in 1910, became the flagship of this position, and the 'Zarist' group that coalesced around it exercised substantial influence over the Menshevik mainstream. He dismissed Lenin's vanguard-party model as a 'conspiratorial organisation detached from the masses' and debated even Martov on questions of party structure and tactics.
When the First World War broke out, Potresov led the defensist wing of Menshevism. He held that German imperialism bore primary responsibility for the war and that an Entente victory would better serve the interests of European Social Democracy, a position that placed him in direct opposition to the anti-war internationalism of the Zimmerwald movement.
After the October Revolution, Potresov rejected Bolshevik rule outright, calling it 'the murder of democracy' and 'the despotism of an oligarchic clique.' In his 1927 book In the Grip of Illusions, published in Paris, he developed a fundamental critique of the official Menshevik leadership's post-revolutionary strategy of seeking reconciliation and coalition with the Bolsheviks, and analysed the Soviet system as the rule of a new exploiting class. In the quarterly Notes of a Social Democrat (23 issues, 1931–1934), he made the restoration of the socialist movement's moral prestige his central concern, warning that a political movement that severs means from ends ultimately destroys itself.